


All Heartless Spectres, Happiness

by Venhedish



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Blow Jobs, Canon Compliant, Deepthroating, Dom Sam Winchester, Dom/sub, Episode: s06e06 You Can't Handle The Truth, F/M, Face Slapping, Face-Fucking, Facials, Infidelity, M/M, POV Lisa Braeden, POV Outsider, Season/Series 06, Sex Tapes, Sibling Incest, Soulless Sam Winchester, Sub Dean Winchester, Supernatural Kink Bingo 2021
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 10:41:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30071016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Venhedish/pseuds/Venhedish
Summary: Lisa Braeden receives an email with the subject line,"You Deserve to Know."It contains a single video file and nothing else.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Lisa Braeden/Dean Winchester
Comments: 12
Kudos: 53
Collections: SPN Kink Bingo 2021





	All Heartless Spectres, Happiness

**Author's Note:**

> A fill for the Filming Sex square on my 2021 SPN Kink Bingo board. 98% canon-compliant. Some dialogue taken verbatim from the episode, some added in with a little artistic license. Beta'd by [Kalutyka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalutyka).
> 
> Title from ee cummings', [since feeling is first](https://eecummings.tumblr.com/post/104211687/unloves-the-heavenless-hell-and-homeless-home-of).

It was Wednesday, and Wednesdays meant early mornings at the Braeden house. Ben had karate before school and Lisa taught a 6:45 yoga class, so she was up and at her laptop with a mug of coffee in her hands by 5:15. Ben could grab another thirty minutes of sleep before she'd pad down to his door and get him up, and then they’d have oatmeal with blueberries for breakfast. Her stomach rumbled quietly at the thought, but she needed to get through her email backlog first. She blinked at her laptop as the screen powered on, feeling spacey and a little out of sorts.

She and Dean had, well. She never expected it to be easy, this arrangement, but it had gone off the rails in a pretty damn spectacular fashion and it hadn’t even taken that long. He’d showed up in the middle of the night with a solemn, terrifying death confession; he’d told her he couldn’t bring his life to her anymore, and then … he shoved her kid, fled back into the night.

Then there was almost a week of radio silence through which she’d been worried out of her mind that he was dead. He’d finally had the decency to pick up his phone last night, just for long enough to tell her he wasn’t decomposing in a ditch somewhere.

She’d tried to engage despite her frustration – hell, she’d even made small talk in her relief to know he was still alive, but he was so distracted. Wasn’t she the one who was supposed to be angry?

Instead, it was like he could barely pay her any mind. It sounded like he was busy—working on the car or something—out of breath with exertion. Typical. Let Dean Winchester pour his heart into an inanimate object, she thought, something that couldn't possibly hurt him back. He said he was busy; she’d rolled her eyes and let the call drop, had cried herself to sleep.

And when the alarm rang her awake at 5:00 this morning, well, she put her feet on the floor and poured herself a cup of coffee and didn't look at the picture of the three of them stuck on the refrigerator with a magnet in the shape of a screwdriver, or any of the other magnetic tools and their little red toolbox (a set she bought to make the house feel a little more like his even if it was a goofy gesture. He had smiled at the time). She’d gone straight back upstairs and began her day just as she began any other.

She stared with glazed eyes at her computer screen as the browser loaded. Her inbox was always full, no matter how many times she tried to empty it. There was always another email about her yoga classes, a new PTA notification, a reminder that one of Ben's classmates had a peanut allergy and could parents please not pack PB&Js in their child’s lunch? Her credit card payment was due, the owner of the yoga studio was raising rental rates at the end of the month, her sister had sent pictures of her family on vacation at the beach in the Keys. Lisa sipped her coffee and sighed quietly, blinking in the low light and trying to get her head on straight.

She fired off a few responses to the most pressing emails in the tray and was about to log off to go get Ben up and dressed when a new email notification popped up. It was from an address she didn't recognize, but that wasn’t odd; she got new emails from potential students at the studio all the time. It had a strange subject, though: “You Deserve to Know,” which she thought was a little ominous. She wondered whether it was a phishing thing, with a subject like that. She remembered having to explain to Dean what phishing was when he’d clicked a link to a fake sweepstakes a couple months back. She almost laughed, thinking about his odd assortment of life skills blind spots, but she stopped herself when a memory of Ben’s little frame smashing into the hallway wall played in her mind. She frowned instead.

There was an attachment on the email: a video file.

 _Not at all creepy_ , she thought. God. What if this was from … one of the things they didn’t talk about? Her mind went to those places a lot these days. It was hard not to, with all that had happened recently. Dean had never exactly been loose-lipped, but she wasn’t an idiot. Sam had come back, and….

No. She wasn’t going there, either. She couldn't, not this early, and definitely not without a stiff drink in her hand.

She clicked the email open before her brain could take her any further down that road.

Aside from the title and the attachment, there wasn’t any other text in the body, just a generic _sent from my phone_ signature. The video file was too big to preview. If she wanted to see what was on it, she’d have to download it.

She bit her lip and took another sip of coffee, deliberating. If this _was_ a Dean thing and she didn't open it, she knew she'd end up feeling guilty as hell if someone got hurt because she was worried about a computer virus. She sighed and clicked the download button.

It took so long that she decided to go pour herself another cup of coffee while she waited, and by the time she came back upstairs five minutes later, the download was on its last couple percent. She breathed out a steadying breath through her nose as the download completed and opened the file.

At first, she was a little confused. The video was almost ten minutes long, but the opening shot was empty. It looked like it was being filmed from a cell phone, which made sense with the signature in the email. There was a bed in the shot, covered in a depressing pea-green duvet. Behind it was a drab orange wallpaper that was probably three shades darker than it had started from years of dust and nicotine. And that was it; she could see nothing else. There was a vague, blurry shape in the foreground, maybe a plastic bag, obscuring the left side of the frame, almost like the phone had been set down in a hurry – or like whoever had placed it there wanted it to be hidden.

She moved the mouse to the bar at the bottom of the screen to scrub through the footage and figure out what was happening here, but her hand stilled. There was a quiet voice in the background and the soft sound of running water, like from a sink. The voice was too far away to make out, but she leaned forward in her chair to try and catch it. It was definitely male, but that was all she could tell.

A second later, a figure appeared in the frame. It was the lower half of a man, his hips wrapped in a faded gray towel. He came into view from the right of the screen—presumably from a bathroom—and she realized the camera must be resting on a dresser or something of similar height. The man was facing away from her, so she could only see the bottom few inches of his back down to his mid-calf or so, but even still, she could tell.

She inhaled sharply, and her coffee sloshed a little in its cup. She gripped it tighter.

Dean walked the rest of the way into the frame until she could see all of him, and for a moment he just stood there, scrubbing a hand over his face next to the bed. He leaned over and grabbed his duffle. She recognized it as the purple one with the lotus pattern on it from the studio; she had given it to him when they went away for that weekend at Lake Michigan and he needed something other than army surplus to carry his clothes in.

He opened the bag and rifled through it, pulling out a shirt and jeans and socks like he was about to get dressed, but then he hesitated. There was a shadow suddenly against the wall behind him, and Lisa watched Dean’s head turn to regard whoever must be standing there just out of frame.

If they spoke, she didn't hear them, but Dean dropped the clothes back into the bag after a moment; his shoulders rounded forward a little, softening the angles of his body. She watched the look on his face slide from vaguely pained, tired—a look she knew so intimately it was painted behind her eyelids at this point—to something like wary anticipation. He sucked his plump bottom lip into his mouth, big eyes staring beyond the edge of the frame. There was color high in his cheeks, she could tell, even though the quality of the footage was grainy.

He brought his hand up and rubbed it along the back of his head, a nervous tic she knew, too. “This is-,” he spoke for the first time, and Lisa nearly jumped out of her skin. She hadn’t realized just how close to the screen she was leaning. Her gasp and the pounding of her heart as she sat back blocked out whatever he said next.

She was breathing fast, and so was Dean, but for very different reasons. She knew, then, with sudden clarity: this would hurt her, whatever was happening here.

She watched Dean’s eyes track the movement of the person off-screen, and then flick suddenly to the floor. She heard the soft thump of fabric as it fell to the ground. Another towel?

Her stomach was turning, the cup in her hands shaking slightly, but she clung on for dear life.

_God - don’t let it be …_

There was another body in the frame now. Big, crowding out the entire right side of the screen, just a long tan line of naked skin. It was a man, no question. Downy hair on the legs, thick cut of oblique muscles, and—she couldn't help but notice in a distracted, disbelieving way— a firm, round ass.

Now her gaze flicked back and forth from the man to Dean, the way his eyes couldn't hold still for even a second, the way they traced every inch of the body in front of him. Had he ever looked at her like that? Had his breaths ever come that quick?

The man took another step forward, and now Lisa could see the full, broad plane of his back. There was water pearling on his skin and running in rivulets between his shoulder blades. He was so tall that she couldn't see his hair. _So tall._

She was thankful she couldn't see his hair, for some reason. She wanted to stop the video before she could, but she was frozen in place.

She must have been looking at the wrong thing because suddenly Dean was nodding his head and she didn’t know why. He grabbed the towel where it was folded around his hips and let it drop without ceremony, and there was another mockery of a familiar sight. She should have felt embarrassed to see him like this with someone else, _with another man_ , but she wasn’t. No, the things she was feeling churned in her gut and burned behind her eyes, but not one of them landed anywhere close to embarrassment.

Dean looked like a boy, she realized, his face washed clean of so many years of hard living and guilt and horror. The slate was clean, his eyes wide and his jaw soft. He looked blissfully empty, and when he dropped to his knees on the carpet just out of frame, she thought that was exactly what he wanted.

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding as the man walked slowly up to her lover, her friend, her partner, and his hair was dark, and long, and dripped water down his broad shoulders. He reached out a hand and held it suspended in the air for a long, tense second. Lisa blinked in wide, shocked confusion. _Was he going to--?_ The man spoke in a voice she had dreaded hearing: a single, commanding, “Hush,” and then Sam Winchester’s hand arced through the air and slapped Dean hard across the face.

The Dean in the video was unlike any Dean she’d ever known. He’d just been slapped in the face—naked and on his knees—by his brother, and he’d let it happen. He flinched only the barest amount back, eyes blinking shut, and he bit his lip again. But then his big green eyes opened, a sheen of wet across them making them glimmer in the orange light from some ancient lamp Lisa knew must be just out of frame.

She realized that the slap had jarred her so much that she’d flinched too, even harder than he had. There was a wet puddle of coffee on the desk. She reached out a shaky hand and paused the video.

She set the cup down and gulped in deep, heaving breaths. Her stomach rolled over and she thought she might vomit, but she still couldn't turn away from the still image on the screen. Dean Winchester in grainy 360p video resolution, looking pink and healthy and _happy._ His eyes looked up into his brother's face somewhere she couldn't see, and the adoration—the relief on his face—was clear as a struck bell in her ears. It hurt her, deep in the part of her body that had clenched with love and heat and hope when he’d shown up at her door.

But she’d known, hadn’t she? How could she not have?

Sam was back, now; how else could it have ended? Lisa didn’t even have to ask. Dean didn’t even have to say. It was in the little things: the way he started reaching up to his neck as if to touch a necklace he no longer wore; the way she’d catch him in the kitchen with a bottle of cheap whiskey in his hand in the middle of the night, hurrying to shove an old picture back into his pocket; the way he’d sit in the dark and stare out the window after dinner, silhouetted by the porch light as he burned a hole through the garage wall, imagining the place where his baby sat waiting for him just out of reach.

And now here was the proof – of his betrayal, of her foolishness. And all she could do was stare hopelessly at the face of a man who had never belonged to her.

There was a noise from down the hall—Ben’s bedroom door—and she stood, gathering herself. She wiped her eyes and went to the closet and got dressed and did her makeup and went downstairs and fed her son and drove him to practice and herself to work and she did what she had been doing since she could remember: _she got through it._

It wasn’t her best workday ever, she would admit. She'd been distracted and short with people and on the verge of tears, but she’d managed to hold it together. She kept replaying the video in her head, even as she called for slow breathing exercises and lotus poses and warrior one, even when she walked a group of old ladies through cat-cow and a pregnant mom-to-be through mountain pose – there was Dean, naked on his knees, and there was Sam, slapping him.

That was what really got her, she realized. The brothers thing, well … it killed her and turned her stomach, but above even that was the casual violence of the act, and how _intimate_ they’d made it seem, how illicit her viewing of the act had felt. Dean had never asked her for that, never even hinted that it might be something he wanted.

She pushed a handful of chips and a half-eaten sandwich around on her plate during lunch, unable to take more than a few bites. Why _would_ he want that? Did he think he deserved to be hurt? Lisa hoped not; Dean Winchester was many things, but a man who deserved any more pain was not one of them.

Her heart broke for him despite herself as she drove home, his blank, shining eyes blinking in her mind over and over. Like a play-by-play of someone else’s dream. Or was it a nightmare?

And why Sam? Why the one person in the whole world who would never … _but maybe that was the whole point._ Dean had always trusted Sam, had probably never actually trusted anyone else. Who better to hurt him than his own brother? Lisa shook her head and tried to clear it as she pulled into the driveway. Ben had beaten her home today – no more Dean to make sure he always got picked up, so now Ben rode his bike most days.

She couldn't think of it much once she was back inside. In the shower she debated, just for the barest hint of a second … hands sliding down her warm skin, wet and curious, the image of her lover on his knees, hard and eager. But she couldn't bring herself to cross that line, even though a part of her wanted to.

But she did slap herself, hard, right across the cheek, like she'd watched Sam do to Dean over and over on repeat all day. She had to know. It hurt, and her eyes watered, and she didn’t really understand. It mostly made her feel small and fragile and stupid, but there was a certain clarity behind it that, for a moment, grounded her in a way she hadn’t been all day, almost as if she’d been floating around like a ghost lost in the haze of her heartache, but the pain had shocked her back into her body.

She thought she could understand why Dean might like to feel like that since he seemed more ghost than man most of the time.

They ate dinner almost in silence. Ben told her about karate and a quiz he’d had in math. She nodded and kept her eyes clear and smiled at him and made sure to ask a few questions, but then her hand found its way to her cheek again and there was still a little heat there. She lost her voice and Ben didn’t seem to mind. He knew as well as she did that Dean being gone was taking its toll, that their family had expanded to make room for him and they were a little shaky at the joints now from letting him go again.

Ben did the dishes and she tried to read a little, but the words might as well have been in Japanese. Her thoughts were upstairs with her laptop.

She’d debated all day what to do. Should she confront him? Delete the video? Keep it as proof? Email the sender back? Dean had even called earlier, and she’d debated for a long moment whether she should answer, but the call dropped before she could decide and that was decision enough. She wondered if he knew. He must not. She couldn’t imagine that he would ever, ever admit to such a thing, with his brother or otherwise.

It must have been Sam. Who else could have taken the video or gotten her email address? But why? She didn’t know Dean’s brother beyond the way Dean talked about him—when he was drunk enough to get the words out around the tears—and this didn’t square up with that guy at all. But things were different now, weren’t they? Sam had come back from the dead. He was a mystery; maybe he was a monster. Maybe he was hurting Dean for the wrong reasons and Dean was too blind to see it.

Ben went up to bed while she was still lost in thought and suddenly she realized she was alone. The rest of the video was waiting for her and there was nothing else to keep her from it – no more ways to put it off without blatantly lying to herself, and that had never been how she operated. She climbed the stairs slowly, but her footfalls were sure. She wouldn't let this defeat her; she’d face it like she’d faced everything that had come before, and she’d deal with it head-on.

She sat at her desk and pulled the laptop towards her, opening it with surprisingly steady hands. The video was still up when the screen flashed back to life, still frozen on the image of Dean's face, wide-eyed and hiding nothing.

She took a deep breath and hit play.

The reverberation of the slap still seemed to hang in the air, or maybe her memory was just hyperfocused on the stillness, like the ring after a gunshot. But within seconds, Sam’s hand swung back again and this time Lisa was ready for it. She barely flinched as she watched the man she loved get struck across the cheek a second time.

“Glad you finally asked for it, aren’t you?” Sam asked, and there was no doubt it was him – any last shreds of denial drifted from her as he bent at the waist, his profile in the frame for the first time, and he smiled down at his brother. Dean nodded his assent, Adam’s apple bobbing with the weight of emotion that was written plainly across his face. Sam’s hand came forward again—slow this time—and he cupped his palm around the back of Dean’s head. Lisa was grateful the angle was wrong as she watched Sam drag Dean’s head forward, watched his lips part, eager and shiny, to be obscured by the sharp jut of his brother's hip and the back of his forearm.

The sounds left nothing to her imagination, though. There was a wet groan and a satisfied growl of approval from Sam. _God, he was choking him_ ; it was absolutely brutal. Sam left no room for Dean to adjust or find a pace, just pulled his face in until his mouth was surely flush against Sam's skin and held him there for a long beat. There was the noise of wet suction, a release, heaving breaths, almost a sob. _God._ She couldn’t. She skipped the player forward, let the black of the screen clear her head, and when the video loaded again, she balled her hands into tight fists on the desk.

The phone was filming from the same angle, but their position in the room had changed slightly. It wasn’t as if Lisa could ever actually pretend Dean wasn’t doing exactly what it looked like he was doing, but now she could see it. Dean kneeled below his brother’s dick, mouth only inches from the leaking head of it, and Sam’s hand had slipped from the back of Dean’s head to cradle his face. Everything was wet; spit slick on Dean's lips and the head of Sam’s cock. Tears were streaming down Dean’s face, and his nose was running; moisture caught like dewdrops in his eyelashes.

Lisa was horrified by how beautiful she found him.

Sam grabbed his cock with his free hand, placed it gently against Dean’s parted lips, let him lick out for it with the pink dart of his tongue, only to pull away again. “Mmm,” Sam purred, the edge of a laugh coloring his voice. “If you want it so bad, why don't you come and get it?”

Dean leaned forward, eager and obedient, and slid the length of Sam’s dick into his swollen, abused mouth. He stopped, lips gripping the shaft with a muffled groan; somewhere in the back of her head, in the place where this was happening to someone else, Lisa noted for the first time that Sam had the biggest dick she’d ever seen. Dean let out a shuddery little breath through his nose, and his eyes fluttered closed in an expression of drowsy bliss. Sam’s hand slid from Dean’s cheek to the back of his head again, and he pulled his brother's face to him in one commanding slide, bottoming out deep in the back of Dean's throat.

Dean’s cry was a quiet, broken noise of desperation, and spit pooled wet and slick at the corners of his lips. He reached up and gripped the backs of Sam’s thighs, fingers biting into the flesh and leaving little half-circle marks that might bruise. Sam growled low in his chest.

Lisa closed her eyes, a single errant tear slipping down her cheek. Never, in all the time she had known him, had she found Dean to be so vulnerable, not even close. The stinging pink of his cheeks, his glistening lips, the tears that beaded in his eyelashes and made the green of his eyes almost glow from within a tableau of trust and acceptance and, somehow, peace. Never had he looked at her that way, no matter how she'd tried to coax it out of him.

There were sounds from the laptop, Sam whispering down at Dean. She swallowed, couldn't stop herself from wondering if she’d ever looked at _him_ like that, either. She was pretty sure she’d never looked at _anyone_ the way Dean was looking at Sam on her computer screen.

It was the same look she’d caught on his face at odd moments when he thought he was alone, in some far-off memory she couldn’t imagine. Or when Sam had first come back, standing at the threshold of their house, inviting himself back into Dean’s life. It had been over for months already, hadn't it? Had it ever actually even begun?

The sting of his infidelity barely registered, she realized. This wasn’t Dean out there with some woman at a bar. It wasn’t even Dean with a strange man in a bathroom somewhere. This was Dean with Sam, and it was bizarre, she realized, that that made it more palatable somehow. Like this was always the inevitable conclusion to their relationship – like she had only ever been a placeholder.

That, she finally realized, was what really hurt, and a sob wrenched out of her in earnest. Her shoulders shook with it, this powerful, unnamed feeling that she had never been more than a pitstop on the journey of Dean Winchester's life, that Sam had always been the destination.

Sam was talking louder now. She could hear him over the sound of her own ragged breaths. “I've _always_ wanted this, Dean. It's just taken until now to let myself have it, that's all. You know that, right?

She couldn’t open her eyes, but there was a wet popping sound, a heavy breath, panting and hitching. “I know.” She barely recognized Dean’s voice. It was so different – reverent and soft and warm with love.

“And it’s okay for you to have it, Dean,” Sam said. “We deserve it, don’t we?”

“Yes.” Dean was breathless, his voice barely a whisper.

Lisa cried harder. They did deserve it. Each other.

“Gonna give you what you want,” Sam’s voice growled, and Lisa's hand came to her mouth. She bit her knuckles and cringed at the sounds that filled her ears.

“Please.” Dean's voice was so desperate and plaintive that she couldn't stop herself. She had to look, eyes snapping back to the screen. She was just in time to watch Sam finish himself in two languid strokes; he came across Dean's face and Dean sighed like all the tension of a long, hard life was deflating out of him.

“Thank-” he began, but Lisa reached out and paused the video before she could hear any more. It didn’t stop her from imagining the rest of his words in her head, the gratitude behind them, a loving, _thank you_ , to his brother for marking him, claiming ownership in a physical act of dominance and desire – in a way she never could.

She closed the window, closed the laptop, closed the blinds.

She went to bed. There were no more tears.

The next day, she called him. There was no point running from it or pretending. He deserved the truth as much as she did, and it spilled from her the way it did when she’d had one too many margaritas, but she was stone-cold sober. The words just kept pouring from her mouth, and she couldn’t stop. But why would she want to? For once, it was his turn to take the burden of _her pain_. She’d carried his for long enough; at least now it would be even between them, or as close to it as things would ever be.

“You've got so much buried in there, and you push it down, and you push it down. Do you honestly think that you can go through life like that and _not_ freak out? Just, what, drink half a fifth a night and you're good?” God, it hurt her like the acid sting of vomit in the back of her throat, but the video had played in her dreams all night, interspersed only with images of Dean shoving Ben against the wall, the sound of her son’s tears as he stood shaking in the hallway, betrayed by the only father he’d ever known. It was too much; let him have it all.

“You knew what you signed up for,” Dean said. And was that true? Had she signed up knowing that the man she loved would sleep with his own brother? Put his hands on her baby?

 _God._ Maybe not at first, but at some point? Once the dead had risen?

“I didn't expect Sam to come back.” She said, because that _was_ the truth. “The minute he walked through that door, I knew. It was over.” And that was true, too. “You two have the most unhealthy, tangled-up, crazy thing I've ever seen. And as long as he's in your life, _you're never gonna be happy._ ”

His voice was pained on the other end of the line, as distant as she had ever heard him. “Okay, Lis ... I'm not gonna lie. Okay, me and Sam, we ... we've got issues. No doubt. But you and Ben-”

She stopped him. There was a line she had drawn in the sand between them sometime during the night while she slept, and he had just crossed it for the final time. “Me and Ben can't be in this with you. I'm sorry.”

Even with the truth spilling from her, it was still a struggle to get the words out, to admit to the things she had seen and make them even more real with her words. “I’m not a fool, Dean. I know who you are. You’ve never been able to hide it. I know what you’ve been doing.”

There was only silence from the other line. So be it; her mouth fell into a hard line. Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, fueled by a hot shame that shouldn’t even belong to her. “You and Sam deserve each other,” she said. “Goodbye, Dean.”

And he didn’t argue. She listened to his breath on the other end for a second, and then she pulled the phone from her ear and ended the call.

A week passed, then two. Ben didn’t have to ask. Their lives stayed the same, more or less. She went to work and he went to school and rode his bike to friends’ houses and she picked up an extra shift at the studio to cover the increase in rent and life went on like it always had. The Braedens would survive Dean Winchester; she wouldn’t accept anything less.

It was a month before she let herself look at the email again. Not the video – that had long since been deleted from her hard drive. She scrolled back through her messages until she found it a few pages back, the words _You Deserve to Know_ screaming up at her, and she clicked it open.

She noticed for the first time that the video itself was labeled _08.mp4_ , and she wasn’t sure she wanted to consider what the files named _01-07_ might contain. Instead, she hit the reply button, took a deep breath, and typed out three simple words. _Thank you, Sam._ She didn’t know for sure it had been him, but she’d hedge her bets. Who else would benefit?

She was still at her desk when the response came only a few minutes later: _You’re welcome, Lisa. I just thought it would be easier for everyone if you knew. No hard feelings?_

She blinked at the screen for a long time, tears threatening again. What was wrong with him? Who could even ask that kind of question after what he’d done? She was glad she would never have to get to know Sam Winchester, have him as a brother-in-law, call him a friend. Was that all this was to him, a means to an end? A simple line of communication open to let her know she was no longer needed in his brother’s life?

There was something _wrong_ with Sam Winchester. She actually spent a moment worried for Dean, but she reminded herself that he had chosen this. So be it. She had her son to worry about.

She didn’t respond to Sam’s email, and she never would. She closed the laptop and got up to grab another cup of coffee and get Ben out of bed. There weren’t any hard feelings, she thought, but there _were_ feelings; it would likely take her a long, long time to unpack them enough to name them all. And if she sometimes stood in the shower after a long day and slapped herself hard across the face, it was only to ground herself, not to remember.


End file.
